‘Where?’
‘She’s left me. She left and she said she’s not coming back. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going.’
‘I didn’t know. Can I come in?’
‘Better not.’
Frieda pushed her way past him. She hadn’t been to the house for more than a year and it had an abandoned look to it. A window was cracked, a light fitting had come off the ceiling and bare wires were exposed. She looked around and found a phone under a newspaper in the hall. She took a scrap of paper from her pocket and dialled the number on it. After a brief conversation, she rang off.
‘Where does the phone live?’
‘Anywhere,’ said Reuben. ‘I can never find it.’
‘I’ll make you some coffee.’
As Frieda entered Reuben’s kitchen, she had to hold her hand over her mouth to stop herself retching at the smell. She looked at the wreckage of dirty plates, pans, glasses, boxes and wrappings of half-finished takeaway meals.
‘I wasn’t expecting company,’ said Reuben. His tone was almost defiant, like that of a child who had smashed up his toys. ‘Needs a woman’s touch. This is better than upstairs.’
Frieda felt an impulse just to flee the horrible scene and leave him to it. Hadn’t Reuben said something like that to her years ago? ‘You’ve got to let them make their own mistakes. All you can do is to follow and make sure they don’t scare the horses or get arrested or damage anyone apart from themselves.’ She couldn’t do it. There was no question of clearing up, but she decided she could make at least some sort of pathway through the squalor. She pushed Reuben into a chair where he sat, rubbing his face and muttering. She put the kettle on. Scattered around the kitchen were various half-full and quarter-full bottles: whisky, Cinzano Bianco, wine, Drambuie. She tipped them all down the sink. She found a bin-bag and filled it with old scraps of food. At least that showed he hadn’t only been drinking. She piled crockery in the sink and then, when it was full, around the sink. She opened cupboards and found a jar of instant coffee somewhere high up and forgotten. It hadn’t been opened. She used the end of a spoon to tear open the paper covering the top of the jar. She washed up two mugs and made them each a hot black coffee. Reuben looked at it, gave a groan and shook his head. Frieda lifted the mug towards his mouth. He took a couple of sips and gave another groan. ‘Burned my tongue.’
Still she held the mug, tipping it into his mouth, encouraging him, until half of it was gone.
‘Come to gloat, have you?’ Reuben said. ‘This is where I’ve come to. This is where Reuben McGill has ended up. Or are you going to offer condolences? Are you going to say how very, very sorry you are? Or are you going to give me a lecture?’
Frieda lifted her coffee mug, looked at it and put it back on the table. ‘I came to ask you for advice,’ she said.
‘That’s a laugh,’ said Reuben. ‘Look around you. You think I’m in any kind of position to be dispensing advice?’
‘Alan Dekker,’ said Frieda. ‘The patient I took over from you. Remember him?’
‘Took over from? You mean the one you had me removed from. The one that involved me getting suspended from my own clinic. That one. The problem is, I don’t remember very much about him because my own old student, my protegee, had me booted off the case. So what’s the problem? Has he complained about you as well?’
‘The problem is, he’s got under my skin.’
‘Has he now?’
‘The last couple of days I’ve not been sleeping properly.’
‘You never did sleep properly.’
‘But it was the dreams I’ve been having. I feel like I’ve been infected by him. I wondered if you’d felt anything about him. I thought that might have been why it went wrong between you and him.’
Reuben took a gulp of coffee. ‘Christ, I hate this stuff,’ he said. ‘You remember Dr Schoenbaum?’
‘He was one of your trainers, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s right. He was analysed by Richard Steiner. And Richard Steiner was analysed by Thomas Bayer and Thomas Bayer was analysed by Sigmund Freud. Schoenbaum was like my hotline to God and he taught me that when you were an analyst you weren’t a human being. You were more like a totem pole.’
‘A totem pole?’
‘You were just there. And if your patient comes in and tells you his wife just died, you don’t even offer your condolences. You analyse why he feels the need to tell you that. Schoenbaum was brilliant and he was charismatic and I thought: Fuck that. With my patients I was going to be everything that he wasn’t. I was going to hold the patient’s hand, and in our little room I would do everything they did and go everywhere they went and feel everything they felt.’ Reuben leaned across the table towards Frieda and she could see his eyes close up, yellowy, red-veined in the corners. His breath was sour, reeking of coffee and alcohol and rubbishy food. ‘You wouldn’t believe where I’ve gone. You wouldn’t believe the shit that flows through the human brain, and I’ve walked through it up to my neck. Men have told me things about children and women have told me things about their fathers and their uncles, and I don’t know why they didn’t just go out of the room and blow their fucking brains out, and I thought if I went on the journey with them, if I showed them that they weren’t alone, that someone could share it, then maybe they could come back and make something of their lives. And you know what? After thirty years of it, I’ve had it. You know what Ingrid said to me? She said I was pathetic and that I was drinking too much and that I had become boring.’
‘You did help people,’ said Frieda.
‘You reckon?’ said Reuben. ‘They’d probably have done just as well if they’d taken a few pills or done a bit of exercise or just done nothing. Anyway, I don’t know what it did for them, but it didn’t do me any fucking good. Just look around. This is what it looks like when you let these people inside your head. So if you came here wanting some advice, I’ll give you some: if a patient starts getting to you, give them to someone else. You won’t help them and you won’t help yourself. There. You can go now.’
‘It’s not that I’ve let him get to me, not in the way you mean. It’s just – well, curious. He’s curious.’
‘What do you mean?’
Frieda told him about her sessions with Alan, and about the startled feeling she had had when she opened the paper and read about Matthew. Reuben didn’t interrupt. For a moment, Frieda almost forgot where she was. The years rolled away and she was a student again, articulating her fears to her mentor Reuben. He knew how to listen, when he tried; he leaned slightly forward and his eyes didn’t leave her face.
‘There,’ she said at the end. ‘Do you see what I mean?’
‘Do you remember that patient you had years ago – what was her name? Melody or something.’
‘Melanie, you mean?’
‘That’s it. She was a classic somatizing patient. Irritable bowel syndrome, spells of dizziness and fainting, you name it.’
‘And?’
‘Her anxieties and repressions were embodied in her physical symptoms. She couldn’t admit them, but her body found a way of expressing them.’
‘So you think…’
‘People are very strange and their minds are stranger. Look at that woman who had an allergy to the twentieth century. What was that about? I’m suggesting that Alan is doing something of the same thing. Panic can be free-floating, you know, attaching itself to whatever comes along.’
‘Yes,’ said Frieda, slowly. ‘But he thought about a red-haired child before Matthew disappeared.’
‘Hmm. Well, it was a good theory. In fact, it’s still a good theory – it just applies to you instead of your patient.’
‘Ingenious.’
‘I’m half serious – you’re anxious about Alan, you can’t get to the bottom of him. So you’re attaching his fantasy son to a convenient symbol.’
‘A snatched child is hardly a symbol.’
‘Why not? Everything is a symbol.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Frieda, but she laughed. Her mood had lifted. ‘What about you?’
